In recent years, responding to a demand of reduction of expenses and time for business trips, television conference systems have spread as an example of a transmission system that conducts a television conference via a communication network, such as the Internet. In such a television conference system, the various types of data, for example image data and audio data are transmitted/received between the television conference terminals as an example of transmission terminal to realize the television conference.
Furthermore, in the television conference system, a relay device is used to relay the various types of the transmitted/received data between the television conference terminals. In this case, it is known that one relay device is selected from among a plurality of candidate relay devices every television conference in order, to disperse a load applied to the relay device (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2012-50063, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety). After the selection of a relay device is complete, a transmission management system that manages the television conference terminals controls to connect the television conference terminal with the selected relay device, so that a television conference can be commenced between the television conference terminals.
However, conventionally in a related transmission system, one transmission management system is used to control the start of communication. In a case where a lot of the starts of communication occur at the same time, the single transmission management system should control a plurality of connections between the transmission terminals and the relay devices. As a result, that leads significantly increase of the load applied to the one transmission management system.